Hydrogen production in extreme bacterium

A researcher at Missouri University of Science and Technology has discovered a bacterium that can produce hydrogen, an element that one day could lessen the world's dependence on oil.



Dr. Melanie Mormile, professor of biological sciences at Missouri S&T, and her team discovered the bacterium Halanaerobium hydrogeninformans in Soap Lake, Washington. It can "produce hydrogen under saline and alkaline conditions in amounts that rival genetically modified organisms," Mormile says.


"Usually, I tend to study the overall microbial ecology of extreme environments, but this particular bacterium has caught my attention," Mormile says. "I intend to study this isolate in greater detail."


Mormile, an expert in the microbial ecology of extreme environments, wasn't searching for a bacterium that could produce hydrogen. Instead, she first became interested in bacteria that could help clean up the environment, especially looking at the extremophiles found in Soap Lake. An extremophile is a microorganism that lives in conditions of extreme temperature, acidity, alkalinity or chemical concentration. Living in such a hostile environment, Halanaerobium hydrogeninformans has metabolic capabilities under conditions that occur at some contaminated waste sites.


With Halanaerobium hydrogeninformans, she expected to find an iron-reducing bacterium and describe a new species. What she found was a new species of bacterium that can produce hydrogen and 1, 3-propanediol under high pH and salinity conditions that might turn out to be valuable industrially. An organic compound, 1, 3-propenediol can be formulated into industrial products including composites, adhesives, laminates and coatings. It's also a solvent and can be used as antifreeze.


The infrastructure isn't in place now for hydrogen to replace gasoline as a fuel for planes, trains and automobiles. But if hydrogen becomes an alternative to gasoline, Halanaerobium hydrogeniformans, mass-produced on an industrial scale, might be one solution -- although it won't be a solution anytime soon.


"It would be great if we got liters and liters of production of hydrogen," Mormile says. "However, we have not been able to scale up yet."


In her first single-author article, Mormile's findings were featured in the Nov. 19 edition of Frontiers in Microbiology.


Mormile holds two patents for her work on the Soap Lake bacterium's biohydrogen formation under very alkaline and saline conditions. Also named on the patents are Dr. Judy Wall, Curators' Professor of Biochemistry and Joint Curators' Professor of Molecular Microbiology & Immunology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and her former lab members, Matthew Begemann and Dwayne Elias. A pending patent application, submitted along with Elias; Dr. Oliver Sitton, professor of chemical and biochemical engineering at Missouri S&T; and Daniel Roush, then a master's student for Mormile, is for the conversion of glycerol to 1, 3-propanediol, also under hostile alkaline and saline conditions.


This patented and patent-pending technology is available for licensing through the Missouri S&T Center for Technology Transfer and Economic Development.




Story Source:


The above story is based on materials provided by Missouri University of Science and Technology . The original article was written by Joe McCune. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.



While You Were Offline: Taylor Swift Gets Hacked and Comcast Enrages the Internet


TaylorHackTweet

Screengrab: WIRED



This week, the Internet abounded with important questions: How can someone who’s trademarking a random phrase not look like a villain in these days of information wants to be free? When is a Latina cartoon character not Latina? Why shouldn’t you piss off Comcast? Why are error pages the hot new thing on a certain website? Does anyone care about Super Bowl ads enough to make them worth the cost? And most importantly of all, have you got what a piano-playing dog nee-eeds? The answers to all of these (and more) await you below, as we round up what you need to know about the last seven days on this wild wooly web.


Hashtag Hackers Gonna Hack, Hack, Hack


What Happened: Taylor Swift took on hackers. It still hasn’t been determined who won, to be honest.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: While on vacation earlier this week, Pop’s Favorite Taylor (Sorry Ms. Dayne and Mr. Hawkins) apparently woke up to find her Twitter account had been hacked (and later, her Instagram account, too). Soon thereafter, TMZ reported the hackers were planning on releasing nude pictures of the singer they’d accessed as a result of the hacks, although Swift quickly suggested that was more tabloid fantasy than anything else. (Whether or not the images exist, someone is definitely trying to sell them, as Gawker reported later in the week.)


Something the hackers did have was access to Swift’s Twitter direct messages, which made it online on Tuesday afternoon, only to reinforce the belief that maybe Swift is just a nice person after all. She asks people how their 2015 is going so far! She makes self-conscious jokes about being bad because she plays cards and drinks! She makes whale puns! How could you fail to be charmed by all of that?

The Takeaway: It’s so charming—and the hack in general evokes such sympathy for Swift overall—that it’s almost enough to make you forgive her for trademarking everyday phrases like “this sick beat.” Hackers, well done; you accidentally created the perfect counter-narrative to undo any ill will Taylor might have received otherwise.


Disney Finally Enters A Whole New World


What Happened: In 2015, just 93 years after its creation, Disney announced it would be adding its first Latina Disney princess to its stable of characters. In 2015.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: Disney introduced Elena of Avalor, who’ll show up in the successful Disney Junior series Sofia the First before getting her own TV series next year, and initial feedback was mutedly enthusiastic. Yet many fans wondered why it hadn’t happened before, or why she was only getting a TV show.


And then it turned out that, well, maybe she wouldn’t be Latina after all, because a Disney executive had previously suggested that real world cultures and ethnicities don’t actually exist in Disney’s fairytale lands. This is where you have to start wondering if we should even give Disney points for trying, isn’t it?

The Takeaway: Let’s wait and see if Disney can clarify the status of Elena’s cultural origins and manage to explore them without exploiting or cheapening them, shall we? Next up: Waiting for Disney to realize the problematic elements of the “Princess” archetype in general, and working out ways to deal with those. We’re not going to hold our breath.


Turns Out, Comcast Does Hate Its Customers


What Happened: Comcast officially changed the first name of one of its customers to “Asshole.”

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: Ricardo Brown’s wife called Comcast to try and cancel their cable service, with little success. That’s not to say nothing changed as the result of her attempt, however; instead, the next bill Brown got from the company saw him officially renamed “Asshole Brown.” As you might expect, the story quickly went viral, with seemingly every major site weighing in on the subject. (Reddit also got in on the act.) On the plus side, at least Comcast has apologized, but let’s just wait and see if they also offer free Internet for a couple of years to back up the apology.

The Takeaway: Admit it. Now you’re worried about what your Internet provider secretly calls you, aren’t you?


The Greatest 404 Error Ever


What Happened: Bloomberg.com’s 404 error page has been gaining some fans. Yes, really; the 404 error page.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, media think pieces

What Really Happened: Earlier this week, someone on Twitter noticed that the Bloomberg News site had a great 404 error page. And then, lots of other people noticed. (It’s not just the 404 page, the 500 error page is equally hypnotic, as is the Politics-specific 404 page.) You should thank design company Code and Theory, it turns out.

The Takeaway: Other websites, it’s time to up your game. At least until we find out from Bloomberg that everyone started going to its 404 page at the expense of going to every other page on the site.


It’s The Most Expensive Ad Time Of The Year


What Happened: Ahead of the Big Game, countless Super Bowl ads flooded the Internet.

Where It Blew Up: Blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: With the Super Bowl almost upon us, companies that have spent obscene amounts of money on special ads for the game have tried to maximize their investment by releasing the ads online first and seeing if anyone’s interested. This year’s spots include appearances by Kim Kardashian, Katie Couric and Mindy Kaling—oh, and an entirely adorable lost puppy.



What Went Wrong With the Spider-Man Musical


Spider-Man Fall

Kathy Willens/AP



It’s too bad Glen Berger doesn’t have spidey sense; it would have warned him to run away. But in 2005, when Berger was hired to work on a Broadway musical adaptation of Spider-Man, it seemed like a dream come true for the well-respected but financially struggling playwright. In the wake of the Spider-Man films, a musical version seemed like a surefire hit, especially given the director (Julie Taymor of The Lion King fame) and composers (Bono and Edge of U2). Everyone involved thought the show would be brilliant.


“A New York Times reviewer said this was a show ‘conceived in cynicism,’ and he couldn’t be more wrong,” says Berger in Episode 135 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It was conceived with a sort of naive idealism, and there were a lot of high spirits early on.”


Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark suffered an early setback when its charming producer Tony Adams died of a stroke. But for a while everything seemed to be on track, with the script and music earning high praise from test audiences. The only complaints came from comics fans, who feared a cheesy musical would tarnish Spider-Man’s image, and from critics, who thought superheroes were too lowbrow for Broadway. But Berger and Taymor both saw the character as exactly the sort of demigod hero that’s thrilled audiences for generations.


“Musicals being done around the fire 40,000 years ago, that’s what it was, it was singing and dancing, gods and monsters,” says Berger. “There’s always been this fascination that humans have had with humans fusing with the powers of an animal.”


But soon a string of mishaps plagued the production, from financing woes to technical glitches to injuries on set. Theater critic Michael Riedel set his sights on Spider-Man, whipping up so much notoriety that the show’s troubles became the subject of a New Yorker cover. When Taymor refused to change course, producers replaced her with former circus director Phil McKinley, whose family-friendly revamp became a fair financial success, while falling far short of brilliance.


Berger chronicles the adventure in his memoir Song of Spider-Man , which should stand beside Oedipus Rex as a warning on the dangers of hubris. Still, Berger says that for all the drama, most elements of the musical actually worked quite well.


“What gets lost in this story is how many people actually wound up loving the show,” he says. “For a lot of people, because it was Spider-Man, it was their first musical ever, and for some it was kind of a gateway drug. They were turned on to Broadway musicals in a way they hadn’t been before.”


Listen to our complete interview with Glen Berger in Episode 135 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast (above), and check out some highlights from the discussion below.


Glen Berger on inspiration:


“I was sort of fed up with George W. Bush at this moment, and I was trying to think of a way to do him in without making a martyr out of him, and I kept thinking about, ‘Well, if only a piano could drop on him.’ And then I was thinking more and more about what sort of cynicism it would require to drop a piano on somebody so as not to make a martyr out of them, and that got me thinking about the Green Goblin on top of the Chrysler building, throwing a piano down on the citizens of New York—on the little ants down below—because he had such disdain for them, and from that point forward the scene wrote itself, with the Goblin and Spider-Man on top of the Chrysler building. And a piano, because in a musical a piano made perfect sense—you could start the scene with ‘Green Goblin does Liberace‘ and end it with that. So I wrote that scene, and I guess it got me the job.”


Glen Berger on adaptation:


“It’s a tricky balance because every artist needs to feel like they’re not just doing data entry, they need to feel like they’re contributing something to the iconography. There was a meeting we had early on with Joe Quesada over at Marvel, and he did convey to us this sense that Spider-Man has been around for—at that time—almost 50 years, and all these inkers and artists and writers had been contributing and adding—with a lot of thought and artistry—to just who Peter Parker/Spider-Man is, and what this universe is. And he did convey this sense, certainly to me, that it wasn’t really fair for us to mess with that, that we needed to respect how Spider-Man got to this place in the center of our culture. So I think it is very fair of the fans to expect a lot of respect for the material. That said, they’re also going to howl if it’s just boringly rote. What you want to do is find new ways of telling the story, opening up new perspectives into the story without totally changing it.”


Glen Berger on setbacks:


“Tony Adams was the original producer of Spider-Man. He was an Irish impresario, beautiful man. He’s the one who convinced Marvel in the first place to let him do Spider-Man: The Musical, and he could have persuaded anyone to do anything, he was just that sort of person—he’s the one who persuaded Bono and Edge to get on board. And after a whole lot of wrangling—this was early on in the process, back around 2005—he finally got all the contracts in order and went over to Edge’s apartment to have him sign the deal—Bono had already signed, Julie had already signed, everything was finally coming together. And Edge went to go get a pen, and when he came back he found Tony Adams slumped over, and Tony Adams, who was still in his 50s, was dead the next day, from a stroke. And that, early on, put a wrench in things. It didn’t really occur to anyone at the time that that was going to be in some ways a fatal blow [to the project].”


Glen Berger on political subtext:


“Back in 2005, when I was first writing with Julie, we made Norman Osborn—the reason he was doing these things with genetics was he was convinced humans needed to more quickly adapt to what was clearly going to be a climate change catastrophe in a few years. And Julie was saying, ‘If we make him seem liberal in that way, is that going to turn off all the potential conservative audience members?’ And then she thought, ‘Oh, but he turns out to be the villain.’ So maybe a lot of conservatives would see—you know, people would read into the show whatever political ideology they wanted to read into it. And that turned out to be true, years later, when Glenn Beck saw in the Spider-Man show an affirmation of everything he had been talking about, in terms of the individual rising above the situation, to fighting for liberty and justice, to this climate change proponent getting his comeuppance and all that. So he went on his radio show more than once and was a huge advocate for the show.”


Glen Berger on the new director:


“And so Phil [McKinley] came on board, and he felt like one of the large problems in the show wasn’t just the [story] structure, but also just the tone in general was too dark, and he thought the choreography in certain numbers was too violent, and so he came in and really tried to brighten things up. … This was around the time that Charlie Sheen was having his meltdown, so people saw a lot of similarities between Charlie Sheen and Spider-Man—they called us ‘the Charlie Sheen of theater.’ And he had a thing about his ‘goddesses,’ and at one moment in rehearsal, Phil McKinley, it came to him, ‘Oh, Goblin’s Goddesses, that’s perfect!’ We could have these sort of mutant assistants of Goblin wear these [Goblin’s Goddesses] T-shirts. And then other people on the team are thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s going to date itself within a month.'” That idea fell by the wayside eventually, but there were any number of ideas that were flying around, and of course the tech staff were all freaking out, because they felt like we didn’t really have time to implement even half the changes that were being proposed.”



While You Were Offline: Taylor Swift Gets Hacked and Comcast Enrages the Internet


TaylorHackTweet

Screengrab: WIRED



This week, the Internet abounded with important questions: How can someone who’s trademarking a random phrase not look like a villain in these days of information wants to be free? When is a Latina cartoon character not Latina? Why shouldn’t you piss off Comcast? Why are error pages the hot new thing on a certain website? Does anyone care about Super Bowl ads enough to make them worth the cost? And most importantly of all, have you got what a piano-playing dog nee-eeds? The answers to all of these (and more) await you below, as we round up what you need to know about the last seven days on this wild wooly web.


Hashtag Hackers Gonna Hack, Hack, Hack


What Happened: Taylor Swift took on hackers. It still hasn’t been determined who won, to be honest.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: While on vacation earlier this week, Pop’s Favorite Taylor (Sorry Ms. Dayne and Mr. Hawkins) apparently woke up to find her Twitter account had been hacked (and later, her Instagram account, too). Soon thereafter, TMZ reported the hackers were planning on releasing nude pictures of the singer they’d accessed as a result of the hacks, although Swift quickly suggested that was more tabloid fantasy than anything else. (Whether or not the images exist, someone is definitely trying to sell them, as Gawker reported later in the week.)


Something the hackers did have was access to Swift’s Twitter direct messages, which made it online on Tuesday afternoon, only to reinforce the belief that maybe Swift is just a nice person after all. She asks people how their 2015 is going so far! She makes self-conscious jokes about being bad because she plays cards and drinks! She makes whale puns! How could you fail to be charmed by all of that?

The Takeaway: It’s so charming—and the hack in general evokes such sympathy for Swift overall—that it’s almost enough to make you forgive her for trademarking everyday phrases like “this sick beat.” Hackers, well done; you accidentally created the perfect counter-narrative to undo any ill will Taylor might have received otherwise.


Disney Finally Enters A Whole New World


What Happened: In 2015, just 93 years after its creation, Disney announced it would be adding its first Latina Disney princess to its stable of characters. In 2015.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: Disney introduced Elena of Avalor, who’ll show up in the successful Disney Junior series Sofia the First before getting her own TV series next year, and initial feedback was mutedly enthusiastic. Yet many fans wondered why it hadn’t happened before, or why she was only getting a TV show.


And then it turned out that, well, maybe she wouldn’t be Latina after all, because a Disney executive had previously suggested that real world cultures and ethnicities don’t actually exist in Disney’s fairytale lands. This is where you have to start wondering if we should even give Disney points for trying, isn’t it?

The Takeaway: Let’s wait and see if Disney can clarify the status of Elena’s cultural origins and manage to explore them without exploiting or cheapening them, shall we? Next up: Waiting for Disney to realize the problematic elements of the “Princess” archetype in general, and working out ways to deal with those. We’re not going to hold our breath.


Turns Out, Comcast Does Hate Its Customers


What Happened: Comcast officially changed the first name of one of its customers to “Asshole.”

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: Ricardo Brown’s wife called Comcast to try and cancel their cable service, with little success. That’s not to say nothing changed as the result of her attempt, however; instead, the next bill Brown got from the company saw him officially renamed “Asshole Brown.” As you might expect, the story quickly went viral, with seemingly every major site weighing in on the subject. (Reddit also got in on the act.) On the plus side, at least Comcast has apologized, but let’s just wait and see if they also offer free Internet for a couple of years to back up the apology.

The Takeaway: Admit it. Now you’re worried about what your Internet provider secretly calls you, aren’t you?


The Greatest 404 Error Ever


What Happened: Bloomberg.com’s 404 error page has been gaining some fans. Yes, really; the 404 error page.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, media think pieces

What Really Happened: Earlier this week, someone on Twitter noticed that the Bloomberg News site had a great 404 error page. And then, lots of other people noticed. (It’s not just the 404 page, the 500 error page is equally hypnotic, as is the Politics-specific 404 page.) You should thank design company Code and Theory, it turns out.

The Takeaway: Other websites, it’s time to up your game. At least until we find out from Bloomberg that everyone started going to its 404 page at the expense of going to every other page on the site.


It’s The Most Expensive Ad Time Of The Year


What Happened: Ahead of the Big Game, countless Super Bowl ads flooded the Internet.

Where It Blew Up: Blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: With the Super Bowl almost upon us, companies that have spent obscene amounts of money on special ads for the game have tried to maximize their investment by releasing the ads online first and seeing if anyone’s interested. This year’s spots include appearances by Kim Kardashian, Katie Couric and Mindy Kaling—oh, and an entirely adorable lost puppy.



What Went Wrong With the Spider-Man Musical


Spider-Man Fall

Kathy Willens/AP



It’s too bad Glen Berger doesn’t have spidey sense; it would have warned him to run away. But in 2005, when Berger was hired to work on a Broadway musical adaptation of Spider-Man, it seemed like a dream come true for the well-respected but financially struggling playwright. In the wake of the Spider-Man films, a musical version seemed like a surefire hit, especially given the director (Julie Taymor of The Lion King fame) and composers (Bono and Edge of U2). Everyone involved thought the show would be brilliant.


“A New York Times reviewer said this was a show ‘conceived in cynicism,’ and he couldn’t be more wrong,” says Berger in Episode 135 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It was conceived with a sort of naive idealism, and there were a lot of high spirits early on.”


Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark suffered an early setback when its charming producer Tony Adams died of a stroke. But for a while everything seemed to be on track, with the script and music earning high praise from test audiences. The only complaints came from comics fans, who feared a cheesy musical would tarnish Spider-Man’s image, and from critics, who thought superheroes were too lowbrow for Broadway. But Berger and Taymor both saw the character as exactly the sort of demigod hero that’s thrilled audiences for generations.


“Musicals being done around the fire 40,000 years ago, that’s what it was, it was singing and dancing, gods and monsters,” says Berger. “There’s always been this fascination that humans have had with humans fusing with the powers of an animal.”


But soon a string of mishaps plagued the production, from financing woes to technical glitches to injuries on set. Theater critic Michael Riedel set his sights on Spider-Man, whipping up so much notoriety that the show’s troubles became the subject of a New Yorker cover. When Taymor refused to change course, producers replaced her with former circus director Phil McKinley, whose family-friendly revamp became a fair financial success, while falling far short of brilliance.


Berger chronicles the adventure in his memoir Song of Spider-Man , which should stand beside Oedipus Rex as a warning on the dangers of hubris. Still, Berger says that for all the drama, most elements of the musical actually worked quite well.


“What gets lost in this story is how many people actually wound up loving the show,” he says. “For a lot of people, because it was Spider-Man, it was their first musical ever, and for some it was kind of a gateway drug. They were turned on to Broadway musicals in a way they hadn’t been before.”


Listen to our complete interview with Glen Berger in Episode 135 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast (above), and check out some highlights from the discussion below.


Glen Berger on inspiration:


“I was sort of fed up with George W. Bush at this moment, and I was trying to think of a way to do him in without making a martyr out of him, and I kept thinking about, ‘Well, if only a piano could drop on him.’ And then I was thinking more and more about what sort of cynicism it would require to drop a piano on somebody so as not to make a martyr out of them, and that got me thinking about the Green Goblin on top of the Chrysler building, throwing a piano down on the citizens of New York—on the little ants down below—because he had such disdain for them, and from that point forward the scene wrote itself, with the Goblin and Spider-Man on top of the Chrysler building. And a piano, because in a musical a piano made perfect sense—you could start the scene with ‘Green Goblin does Liberace‘ and end it with that. So I wrote that scene, and I guess it got me the job.”


Glen Berger on adaptation:


“It’s a tricky balance because every artist needs to feel like they’re not just doing data entry, they need to feel like they’re contributing something to the iconography. There was a meeting we had early on with Joe Quesada over at Marvel, and he did convey to us this sense that Spider-Man has been around for—at that time—almost 50 years, and all these inkers and artists and writers had been contributing and adding—with a lot of thought and artistry—to just who Peter Parker/Spider-Man is, and what this universe is. And he did convey this sense, certainly to me, that it wasn’t really fair for us to mess with that, that we needed to respect how Spider-Man got to this place in the center of our culture. So I think it is very fair of the fans to expect a lot of respect for the material. That said, they’re also going to howl if it’s just boringly rote. What you want to do is find new ways of telling the story, opening up new perspectives into the story without totally changing it.”


Glen Berger on setbacks:


“Tony Adams was the original producer of Spider-Man. He was an Irish impresario, beautiful man. He’s the one who convinced Marvel in the first place to let him do Spider-Man: The Musical, and he could have persuaded anyone to do anything, he was just that sort of person—he’s the one who persuaded Bono and Edge to get on board. And after a whole lot of wrangling—this was early on in the process, back around 2005—he finally got all the contracts in order and went over to Edge’s apartment to have him sign the deal—Bono had already signed, Julie had already signed, everything was finally coming together. And Edge went to go get a pen, and when he came back he found Tony Adams slumped over, and Tony Adams, who was still in his 50s, was dead the next day, from a stroke. And that, early on, put a wrench in things. It didn’t really occur to anyone at the time that that was going to be in some ways a fatal blow [to the project].”


Glen Berger on political subtext:


“Back in 2005, when I was first writing with Julie, we made Norman Osborn—the reason he was doing these things with genetics was he was convinced humans needed to more quickly adapt to what was clearly going to be a climate change catastrophe in a few years. And Julie was saying, ‘If we make him seem liberal in that way, is that going to turn off all the potential conservative audience members?’ And then she thought, ‘Oh, but he turns out to be the villain.’ So maybe a lot of conservatives would see—you know, people would read into the show whatever political ideology they wanted to read into it. And that turned out to be true, years later, when Glenn Beck saw in the Spider-Man show an affirmation of everything he had been talking about, in terms of the individual rising above the situation, to fighting for liberty and justice, to this climate change proponent getting his comeuppance and all that. So he went on his radio show more than once and was a huge advocate for the show.”


Glen Berger on the new director:


“And so Phil [McKinley] came on board, and he felt like one of the large problems in the show wasn’t just the [story] structure, but also just the tone in general was too dark, and he thought the choreography in certain numbers was too violent, and so he came in and really tried to brighten things up. … This was around the time that Charlie Sheen was having his meltdown, so people saw a lot of similarities between Charlie Sheen and Spider-Man—they called us ‘the Charlie Sheen of theater.’ And he had a thing about his ‘goddesses,’ and at one moment in rehearsal, Phil McKinley, it came to him, ‘Oh, Goblin’s Goddesses, that’s perfect!’ We could have these sort of mutant assistants of Goblin wear these [Goblin’s Goddesses] T-shirts. And then other people on the team are thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s going to date itself within a month.'” That idea fell by the wayside eventually, but there were any number of ideas that were flying around, and of course the tech staff were all freaking out, because they felt like we didn’t really have time to implement even half the changes that were being proposed.”



Tech Time Warp of the Week: Return to 1974, When a Computer Ordered a Pizza for the First Time


On December 4, 1974, a hapless pizza restaurant worker answered the phone and heard a strange, robotic voice. “I’d like to order a pizza,” the voice said. “A large pizza, please. Pepperoni and mushrooms.” The worker asked for the address, but then hung-up when the voice took too long to respond.


The caller on the other end was Donald Sherman. But it wasn’t his voice. He had a rare disorder called Möbius syndrome, which results in facial paralysis and makes speech difficult. Sherman was calling from the Michigan State University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he was using one of the very first text-to-speech systems to try to order a pizza.


Sherman was using a system designed by John Eulenberg and J. J. Jackson and consisting of a CDC 6500 mainframe computer nicknamed “Alexander” and a device called the Votrax voice synthesizer.


The first few places Sherman called thought it was a prank, but at last someone took the call seriously. Alexander could speak clearly enough to place the order, and the pizza was delivered.


It was the first time anyone used a computer to order a pizza, and more importantly, it proved that text-to-speech systems could be used to effectively communicate in the real-world. Forty years before Siri.



Tech Time Warp of the Week: Return to 1974, When a Computer Ordered a Pizza for the First Time


On December 4, 1974, a hapless pizza restaurant worker answered the phone and heard a strange, robotic voice. “I’d like to order a pizza,” the voice said. “A large pizza, please. Pepperoni and mushrooms.” The worker asked for the address, but then hung-up when the voice took too long to respond.


The caller on the other end was Donald Sherman. But it wasn’t his voice. He had a rare disorder called Möbius syndrome, which results in facial paralysis and makes speech difficult. Sherman was calling from the Michigan State University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he was using one of the very first text-to-speech systems to try to order a pizza.


Sherman was using a system designed by John Eulenberg and J. J. Jackson and consisting of a CDC 6500 mainframe computer nicknamed “Alexander” and a device called the Votrax voice synthesizer.


The first few places Sherman called thought it was a prank, but at last someone took the call seriously. Alexander could speak clearly enough to place the order, and the pizza was delivered.


It was the first time anyone used a computer to order a pizza, and more importantly, it proved that text-to-speech systems could be used to effectively communicate in the real-world. Forty years before Siri.



Facebook Is Making News Feed Better By Asking Real People Direct Questions


Social Media Life

Getty Images



It’s a well-known fact that Facebook’s flagship feature, News Feed, is run by algorithms.

Essentially, invisible computations are going on all the time that automatically optimize future items you see on your feed, depending on the actions you take now—what you click on, what you like, what you comment on. The goal, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg told WIRED in 2013, is “to build the perfect personalized newspaper for 1.1 billion people and counting.”


But Facebook knows that it can do better than relying solely on these cold computations.


As detailed in a new piece on Backchannel by former WIRED writer Steven Levy, Facebook is currently running a focus-group-like program that asks people direct questions about News Feed items in an effort to improve post relevance. According to Levy, the pilot program started last August, testing just 30 Facebook users in an office in Knoxville, Tennessee.


It has now expanded to 600 people around the country, who are paid by Facebook to work answering News Feed questions four hours a day from home. Eventually, Facebook could offer some kind of direct questioning to its entire population of users.


The project works like this: each of these 600 Facebook users is presented with 30 top News Feed stories in a random order. Then they go through each story one by one. They can comment, share, follow a link, or choose to ignore the story. After that they answer eight questions about each item, including how much they cared about the subject of the story, how welcome the story was in their News Feed, how entertaining it was, and how much the story connected them to friends and family. Finally, they are asked to write a few sentences describing their overall feelings about the News Feed story.


Facebook itself acknowledges there are problems with how News Feed is currently set up. It’s already very good at delivering personal news from close friends—things like marriages, childbirths and vacations—but it’s also overrun with items that are sugary sweet and designed to tug at your emotions, which Levy has dubbed the “Dozen Doughnuts problem.”


The donut-y content contrasts with a “vegetables” of real journalism and hard news. When so many of those donuts are presented to you at a time, you’re bound to click on at least one item. And that click sends a strong signal to Facebook: you want to see more of the same thing.


Facebook could interfere. But especially in the case of News Feed, it prefers not to be heavy-handed. “We really try to not express any editorial judgment,” Adam Mosseri, News Feed product director, tells Levy. “We might think that Ferguson is more important than the Ice Bucket Challenge but we don’t think we should be forcing people to eat their vegetables even though we may or may not think vegetables are healthy.”


Preliminary results have already emerged. As expected, news from close friends—especially tagged and photo stories—has been consistently rated as highly relevant. But other things, like the meaning of a “like,” has proven to be more ambiguous. It could mean anything from the approval of a story to validation of a user’s connection to the author.


Unfortunately, so far, it looks like users are less willing to engage with “meaningful” stories or news, preferring anything that triggers a strong emotional response. But Facebook is hopeful that when it begins asking users about sets of stories instead of individual items people will start to reward informative content.


Though some Facebook employees are quoted in Levy’s story as wanting to do the right thing by fixing the News Feed, the real reason why Facebook may have a vested interest in making News Feed the best product it can be is glossed over. Facebook made $2 billion in ad revenue last quarter, more than two-thirds of its total $3.59 billion in ad revenue for 2014.


And where do those ads live? In News Feed. If the social network can crack the problem of what users really want from News Feed, they can presumably apply those learnings to ads, too—and make those ads irresistible to its users in the process.



How Imgur’s New GIF-Maker Stacks Up Against Other Tools Out There


There’s a new kid on the GIF-creation scene, and it’s a good kid. This week, Imgur launched a new “Video to GIF” feature that lets you enter a URL, adjust the parameters of a clip, and get a great-looking GIF or GIFV file within a few seconds. It puts that animation on an Imgur page, so if you have an account, you can share it on Imgur and host comments from all the wonderful Internet people.


Of course, Imgur is not the first or the only free GIF-creation tool on the Web. We take a look at the newest GIF generator, and see how it stacks up against some other offerings we’ve used.


Imgur Video to GIF


What it does: Converts any video URL to a GIF or GIFV. The newest GIF-creator on the block is also one of the most versatile—at least if you want to convert a video. The new Video to GIF option at Imgur allows you to just pop in a video URL—YouTube, Vimeo, Funny Or Die, or pretty much any other video service. You select an entry point for the clip, pick a length from 0.5 to 15 seconds with the scrubber, and even add a text subtitle if you want. The tool spits out a GIF if the file is less than 10MB, or a GIFV if it’s bigger. The results show up in an Imgur template, but you can open the file alone in a new window or tab by right-clicking on it. You can also embed it in a web page using an iframe, like this:


GifYouTube


What it does: Converts any YouTube video to a GIF or WebM video. If you’re working with a YouTube clip, GIFYouTube is probably the fastest way to get what you need; you just add “gif” before the “youtube” in the address bar, and you’re off to the GIF-making races. You can turn clips into GIFs that are 1 to 15 seconds long, and GIFYouTube gives you the option of viewing it as a WebM video file or a GIF. Your results show up in a GIFYouTube template, but you can also view the GIF by its lonesome if you copy image URL. GIFYouTube doesn’t do text overlays, and the GIFs are grainier than Imgur’s output, but it’s a really quick way to get it done from a YouTube page.


EZGIF


What it does: Lets you edit existing GIFs. EZGIF is a go-to post-production tool if you’re really serious about your GIFs. You can use it to create GIFs from images or uploaded video (it doesn’t create them from YouTube links). But it’s the editing options that are killer. You can resize and crop existing GIFs by their URL, and you can add effects to existing GIFs. The “GIF Effects” tab lets you apply filters, flip the GIF horizontally or vertically, add a text overlay, or change its speed.


Imgflip


What it does: Converts video files, YouTube videos, and images to GIFs. Imgflip is certainly a versatile GIF-creation tool, but it requires registration to get the most of it. There are tons of options: You can fine-tune the speed, size, and image quality of the GIF, and you can add text, crop, rotate the GIF, and even reverse it. But in order to create a GIF from a YouTube video, you need to create a free account. You also need to create an account to “claim” your GIF, or else it will be deleted after an hour. Imgflip’s free GIFs are watermarked, too—you need a $10-per-month Pro account to get watermark-free images.


http://picasion.com/


Picasion


What it does: Converts a series of static images to slideshow GIFs (see above). Picasion doesn’t offer the video-to-GIF abilities or crazy tweakability of Imgflip, but it does crank out clean GIFs without an annoying wrapper page. No registration is needed, either. The service lets you set the size of the GIF and the frame-by-frame playback speed.


GifMaker.me


What it does: Converts images to GIFs. This one’s another quick-and-easy service for turning a bunch of images into a slideshow-style GIF, but you can only view your work on GifMaker’s page template. There’s no clean GIF-only URL, which is a bummer. You can adjust the size, speed, and repeat settings for your GIF with this service.


Deal With It GIF Creator


What it does: Converts images to “Deal With It” montages. This site only does one thing, but it does it well: It makes a pair of sunglasses fall from the sky, stop where you want them to, and then displays the text “Deal With It” at the bottom of the GIF. You can edit the text to say what you want, change up the text color, resize the sunglasses, and even add several more pairs of shades to the mix. Assert your authority!


deal_with_it



Facebook Is Making News Feed Better By Asking Real People Direct Questions


Social Media Life

Getty Images



It’s a well-known fact that Facebook’s flagship feature, News Feed, is run by algorithms.

Essentially, invisible computations are going on all the time that automatically optimize future items you see on your feed, depending on the actions you take now—what you click on, what you like, what you comment on. The goal, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg told WIRED in 2013, is “to build the perfect personalized newspaper for 1.1 billion people and counting.”


But Facebook knows that it can do better than relying solely on these cold computations.


As detailed in a new piece on Backchannel by former WIRED writer Steven Levy, Facebook is currently running a focus-group-like program that asks people direct questions about News Feed items in an effort to improve post relevance. According to Levy, the pilot program started last August, testing just 30 Facebook users in an office in Knoxville, Tennessee.


It has now expanded to 600 people around the country, who are paid by Facebook to work answering News Feed questions four hours a day from home. Eventually, Facebook could offer some kind of direct questioning to its entire population of users.


The project works like this: each of these 600 Facebook users is presented with 30 top News Feed stories in a random order. Then they go through each story one by one. They can comment, share, follow a link, or choose to ignore the story. After that they answer eight questions about each item, including how much they cared about the subject of the story, how welcome the story was in their News Feed, how entertaining it was, and how much the story connected them to friends and family. Finally, they are asked to write a few sentences describing their overall feelings about the News Feed story.


Facebook itself acknowledges there are problems with how News Feed is currently set up. It’s already very good at delivering personal news from close friends—things like marriages, childbirths and vacations—but it’s also overrun with items that are sugary sweet and designed to tug at your emotions, which Levy has dubbed the “Dozen Doughnuts problem.”


The donut-y content contrasts with a “vegetables” of real journalism and hard news. When so many of those donuts are presented to you at a time, you’re bound to click on at least one item. And that click sends a strong signal to Facebook: you want to see more of the same thing.


Facebook could interfere. But especially in the case of News Feed, it prefers not to be heavy-handed. “We really try to not express any editorial judgment,” Adam Mosseri, News Feed product director, tells Levy. “We might think that Ferguson is more important than the Ice Bucket Challenge but we don’t think we should be forcing people to eat their vegetables even though we may or may not think vegetables are healthy.”


Preliminary results have already emerged. As expected, news from close friends—especially tagged and photo stories—has been consistently rated as highly relevant. But other things, like the meaning of a “like,” has proven to be more ambiguous. It could mean anything from the approval of a story to validation of a user’s connection to the author.


Unfortunately, so far, it looks like users are less willing to engage with “meaningful” stories or news, preferring anything that triggers a strong emotional response. But Facebook is hopeful that when it begins asking users about sets of stories instead of individual items people will start to reward informative content.


Though some Facebook employees are quoted in Levy’s story as wanting to do the right thing by fixing the News Feed, the real reason why Facebook may have a vested interest in making News Feed the best product it can be is glossed over. Facebook made $2 billion in ad revenue last quarter, more than two-thirds of its total $3.59 billion in ad revenue for 2014.


And where do those ads live? In News Feed. If the social network can crack the problem of what users really want from News Feed, they can presumably apply those learnings to ads, too—and make those ads irresistible to its users in the process.



Imgur’s New GIF Tool Is Awesome. Here Are Some Other Great Options


There’s a new kid on the GIF-creation scene, and it’s a good kid. This week, Imgur launched a new “Video to GIF” feature that lets you enter a URL, adjust the parameters of a clip, and get a great-looking GIF or GIFV file within a few seconds. It puts that animation on an Imgur page, so if you have an account, you can share it on Imgur and host comments from all the wonderful Internet people.


Of course, Imgur is not the first or the only free GIF-creation tool on the Web. We take a look at the newest GIF generator, and see how it stacks up against some other offerings we’ve used.


Imgur Video to GIF


What it does: Converts any video URL to a GIF or GIFV. The newest GIF-creator on the block is also one of the most versatile—at least if you want to convert a video. The new Video to GIF option at Imgur allows you to just pop in a video URL—YouTube, Vimeo, Funny Or Die, or pretty much any other video service. You select an entry point for the clip, pick a length from 0.5 to 15 seconds with the scrubber, and even add a text subtitle if you want. The tool spits out a GIF if the file is less than 10MB, or a GIFV if it’s bigger. The results show up in an Imgur template, but you can open the file alone in a new window or tab by right-clicking on it. You can also embed it in a web page using an iframe, like this:


GifYouTube


What it does: Converts any YouTube video to a GIF or WebM video. If you’re working with a YouTube clip, GIFYouTube is probably the fastest way to get what you need; you just add “gif” before the “youtube” in the address bar, and you’re off to the GIF-making races. You can turn clips into GIFs that are 1 to 15 seconds long, and GIFYouTube gives you the option of viewing it as a WebM video file or a GIF. Your results show up in a GIFYouTube template, but you can also view the GIF by its lonesome if you copy image URL. GIFYouTube doesn’t do text overlays, and the GIFs are grainier than Imgur’s output, but it’s a really quick way to get it done from a YouTube page.


EZGIF


What it does: Lets you edit existing GIFs. EZGIF is a go-to post-production tool if you’re really serious about your GIFs. You can use it to create GIFs from images or uploaded video (it doesn’t create them from YouTube links). But it’s the editing options that are killer. You can resize and crop existing GIFs by their URL, and you can add effects to existing GIFs. The “GIF Effects” tab lets you apply filters, flip the GIF horizontally or vertically, add a text overlay, or change its speed.


Imgflip


What it does: Converts video files, YouTube videos, and images to GIFs. Imgflip is certainly a versatile GIF-creation tool, but it requires registration to get the most of it. There are tons of options: You can fine-tune the speed, size, and image quality of the GIF, and you can add text, crop, rotate the GIF, and even reverse it. But in order to create a GIF from a YouTube video, you need to create a free account. You also need to create an account to “claim” your GIF, or else it will be deleted after an hour. Imgflip’s free GIFs are watermarked, too—you need a $10-per-month Pro account to get watermark-free images.


http://picasion.com/


Picasion


What it does: Converts a series of static images to slideshow GIFs (see above). Picasion doesn’t offer the video-to-GIF abilities or crazy tweakability of Imgflip, but it does crank out clean GIFs without an annoying wrapper page. No registration is needed, either. The service lets you set the size of the GIF and the frame-by-frame playback speed.


GifMaker.me


What it does: Converts images to GIFs. This one’s another quick-and-easy service for turning a bunch of images into a slideshow-style GIF, but you can only view your work on GifMaker’s page template. There’s no clean GIF-only URL, which is a bummer. You can adjust the size, speed, and repeat settings for your GIF with this service.


Deal With It GIF Creator


What it does: Converts images to “Deal With It” montages. This site only does one thing, but it does it well: It makes a pair of sunglasses fall from the sky, stop where you want them to, and then displays the text “Deal With It” at the bottom of the GIF. You can edit the text to say what you want, change up the text color, resize the sunglasses, and even add several more pairs of shades to the mix. Assert your authority!


deal_with_it



Vinyl or CDs: Tech Doesn’t Do Sentimental — Listening Habits Show What’s Next for Cloud


cloud_computing_660

incredibleguy/Flickr



I am old enough to be of the generation that grew up with vinyl. Unlike the romantics of today I remember the scratches, the arguments over borrowing my brother’s records, putting them on my worn and generally abused record player and the reality that after the first few plays, even with that brand new stylus, the quality degraded to that “warm” or, in reality, muffled sound that I remember. The revival we see today is a choice, largely based on the sentimental feelings that we tend to attach to music. Yes, I miss the artwork, the feel and smell, but do I miss the general faff? Not really. Even with a vinyl revival, we have moved light years away in terms of the volume of recordings available digitally today. There are very few who would want to go back to how it used to be. The choice of vinyl is from the world of irrationality not the rational.


The point is that technology doesn’t do sentimental. Compact Discs wiped the floor with vinyl records because they could hold more, were more robust and the sound was consistently good. Downloads have taken this further mainly driven not by sound quality but convenience of format, i.e. the iPod. We are driving down the all too familiar silicon integration cost convenience curve which is underpinned by Moore’s law; skip the box, skip the media and the album. I just want the song. In fact, I don’t have the patience to download, I’m going to stream it… and so on we go.


How do we get from this to thinking about the future of cloud? Well, for me the two are related. My first ever job was working for the American mixed signal chipmaker Analog Devices. Mixed signal simply means analog and digital signals; analog being the “real world” and digital being that of a computer. So their trade was and is in the conversion of the real world into the easier to manipulate, more robust and generally cheaper world of digital – and back again.


When I first started there, the division I worked in made an esoteric analog-digital converter which translated the movement of transducers found on airplanes, tanks, steel mills and missiles into digital so control systems could make the right decisions. There were two methods for making the same thing: the “Hybrid” and the “Monolithic”. At that time, 1987, the Hybrids ruled the day. In those days, the term “hybrid” was used to describe a component where we had to use two different types of silicon to get the thing to work. Hybrid literally means “different elements”. Conversely Monolithic means “(on) the same piece”. The key point was that the monolithic product was cheaper to make – a lot, lot cheaper. It didn’t require the hands of a surgeon to place components on ceramic substrates with gold interconnects. It relied instead on an automated semiconductor process. You know which production method eventually won out.


Let’s move the argument to the current state of cloud computing. Hybrid clouds are very much in vogue and characterize a status quo where the current internet-based cloud doesn’t meet the requirements of all the applications we have. So, we marry the public cloud with private cloud architectures, where we traditionally have foregone flexibility and elasticity for security and control.


As happened in the past, for those analog-digital semiconductors, the world of hybrid cloud is also just a transition, simply a stopping point, not a destination. We currently have pools of computing connected by a variety of communication methods, and we simply haven’t worked out the process to reach the “monolithic” stage. But we will. Current cloud computing is generally made of three things, elastic CPU, RAM and Disk. These can be reached via the internet or some fixed network. Just as semiconductors evolved architectures and designs so that they could become “monolithic”, the same will apply to cloud computing, but writ large across the globe.


The evolution of cloud from pools out on the internet will therefore evolve from today’s triple play to a “quad play” as the fourth element, the network, is integrated and automated for both private and public cloud types of environments – or to give network back its original name, Inter Process Communication, (tipping my hat here to a long line of luminaries who have made this point, from the father of Ethernet, Robert Metcalfe, to Professor John Day pioneering the next evolution of the internet).


Cloud is not a technology but a dynamic way of optimizing your consumption with the availability of resources – the same evolution that has taken us from vinyl to CD to download. The challenge is therefore to restore the original vision of the founding fathers of the core technology that underpins the digital and with it the global economy. The arrival at a global, monolithic “platform of computing” where the network is the computer isn’t a vision or choice. It’s simply the realization of a world set out and supported by a model which has remained faithfully predictable for the last 50 years.


Matthew Finnie is Group CTO and EVP of Cloud Services at Interoute.



The New Space Race: Bringing Internet to the Other 4 Billion


A replica of Sputnik 1 at the U.S. National Air and Space Museum

A replica of Sputnik 1 at the U.S. National Air and Space Museum. The USSR’s small satellite is responsible for starting the space race with the US. Today’s race is off and running. NASA



Back in the 1960s, the race was on between the United States and the USSR to see who could get to the moon first. That high-stakes competition ushered in a new era of space exploration featuring incredible levels of ingenuity, creativity, and scientific mastery. Now, decades later, we are on the verge of yet another space race – the race to build a satellite network capable of bringing the Internet to the estimated 4.4 billion people currently living without access to the “world wide” web.


The company most invested in providing Internet access to the entire planet is ‘net behemoth Google. Through at least two initiatives of their own and a recent $1 billion investment in SpaceX, Google has made it clear that connecting the globe is a serious priority both in the immediate future and beyond.


At the moment, three major efforts are being made to connect the globe to the power of the Internet. And while each has a similar short-term mission, the future applications of each is impressively distinct.


Project Loon


Adopting an innovative – if unorthodox – strategy, Google’s own Project Loon aims to make the Internet more widely available through the use of giant balloons. These special high-altitude balloons are launched into the stratosphere (around 20 kilometers above the surface of the Earth) where they float safely above the danger of airplanes and unfavorable weather. Though it sounds strange, the project is actually ingenious.


Google’s hopes are that Project Loon will provide an inexpensive method for increasing the coverage area needed to bring the web to inhabitants of especially remote areas. The balloons in question are designed with an algorithm utilizes natural patterns of sub-atmospheric wind to ensure that consistent coverage is provided when and where it’s needed most. In effect, the balloons form an enormous communication network that may one day span the entire globe.


In addition to smart programming, the balloons are solar-powered and can provide Internet coverage to an area around 40 kilometers in diameter. By partnering with numerous telecommunications companies, Google hopes Project Loon can use wireless LTE technology to allow people within the coverage area to connect to the web from phones and other mobile devices. The first tests for Project Loon began in the summer of 2013 in New Zealand and have since expanded to cover more ground. The results are have promising, meaning that balloons may be a big part of the Internet’s future.


OneWeb


Led by former Google innovator Greg Wyler, OneWeb looks to bring the Internet to billions through a massive satellite network, one they say will be the largest in the world. Wyler is no stranger to delivering the Internet to remote areas, having set up Africa’s first 3G cell network. He also founded O3B (another company dedicated to bringing the Internet to the entirety of the mankind) before being recruited by Google to head an in-house initiative with the same goal.


OneWeb’s plan includes launching nearly 700 satellites into space, creating a network built to provide high speed Internet at a low cost. The project has already receiving up to $2 billion from financial backers like Qualcomm and Virgin Galactic , with the latter providing use of its LauncherOne program to put the satellites into orbit.


Though still a few years behind Project Loon, OneWeb’s more advanced technology promises far more complex network security and a broader overall reach (it could become a truly worldwide provider, rather than solely focusing on underdeveloped areas.) The OneWeb project has also cleared another important hurdle that remains in place for competitor SpaceX — obtaining the rights to the spectrum needed to deliver the Internet from space


SpaceX


The latest venture for billionaire Elon Musk, SpaceX has already made a splash with its work to advance private space travel. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the company is a major player in the race for worldwide Internet. Musk’s project is similar in design to that being worked on by OneWeb, Musk asserts that his undertaking will be “an order of magnitude more sophisticated than what Greg (Wyler) wants.” In fact, some reports have indicated that Musk and Wyler were interested in partnering, but disagreements over technology and Wyler’s refusal to give up a large stake in O3b broke off any partnership.


Instead, Musk has pushed ahead, stating that he believes “there should be two competing systems.” This competition will be bolstered by the recent $1 billion investment recently poured into SpaceX by investors Google and Fidelity.


The biggest hurdle remaining is the rights to a broadcast spectrum like the one that OneWeb has already locked up. Richard Branson, whose Virgin brand is a key OneWeb investor, believes this could be a dealbreaker for SpaceX. “I don’t think Elon can do a competing thing,” Branson says. “Greg has the rights, and there isn’t space for another network — like there physically is not enough space. If Elon wants to get into this area, the logical thing for him would be to tie up with us.” Musk has instead “discussed using optical-laser technology in his satellites,” though lasers (which can’t pass through clouds) would be a far less reliable method of delivering a connection. Undaunted, Musk says the first stage of the project could be done within five years, but later stages may expand the scope beyond Earth. The long-term goal for the project is to expand a connected network all the way to Mars, where Musk hopes to build a colony in the not-too-distant future.


With billions of dollars in financial backing, all three of these projects seem poised to achieve the goal of delivering the Internet to the entire globe. And for the first time in decades, a new space race has the potential to radically change the life of billions here on earth.


Rick Delgado is a technology commentator and freelance journalist.



Jay-Z Makes a Bid to Acquire a Swedish Streaming Music Company


Jay-Z performs at the 3rd Global Citizen Festival in Central Park in New York, on Saturday, Sept. 27, 2014.

Jay-Z performs at the 3rd Global Citizen Festival in Central Park in New York, on Saturday, Sept. 27, 2014. Brad Barket/Invision/AP



Jay-Z’s empire may soon be a little bit larger. The rapper and business mogul is about to get into the streaming music business.


On Friday, the Swedish company Aspiro, which is behind the streaming services WiMP and Tidal, announced that Jay-Z’s company, Project Panther, had submitted a bid to acquire Aspiro for $56 million. The deal, which already has unanimous approval, according to a board statement, would catapult Jay-Z, whose given name is Shawn Carter, into one of tech’s most competitive industries.


Gone are the days when Pandora was the only option around for streaming music. Today, there’s Spotify, Rdio, Beats Music, and Sony’s newly announced Playstation Music, which is powered by Spotify. Each service offers a different breadth of music options, for different prices, on different devices, in hopes of eking out a bigger slice of the music streaming pie. If Pandora’s going to be pre-loaded in your BMW, then Spotify’s going to seize on your Uber ride, and Apple’s going to make sure that Beats Music, which it acquired along with Beats’ hardware business last year, is on every single iPhone.


With WiMP and Tidal, Jay-Z would have lots of catching up to do. Today, WiMP has just 512,000 paying users, compared against Spotify’s 15 million and counting. Tidal has yet to release its numbers. Still, both WiMP and Tidal do promise music lovers something different from leading competitors: a higher quality listening experience. That’s because it uses a process called lossless compression that preserves the original audio data, even when the file is compressed. While other options exist for high fidelity audio, including Neil Young’s recently released PonoMusic player (which has faced some harsh criticism since its debut), they’ve yet to truly catch on with the masses. That could be because, generally, they tend to be more expensive than the alternatives, which is a tough sell for a generation that’s grown up on all-you-can-eat, free streaming. Tidal, for one, costs $20 a month.


Still, as arguably one of the most famous faces in music today — not to mention one half of the most famous couple in music today — Jay-Z may be able to bring some much needed cachet to this new type of streaming technology. And for Jay, the advantage is clear. With his hands on a streaming service, he’ll be better able to promote the other parts of his empire, including his entertainment company Roc Nation, and the artists it represents.



Vinyl or CDs: Tech Doesn’t Do Sentimental — Listening Habits Show What’s Next for Cloud


cloud_computing_660

incredibleguy/Flickr



I am old enough to be of the generation that grew up with vinyl. Unlike the romantics of today I remember the scratches, the arguments over borrowing my brother’s records, putting them on my worn and generally abused record player and the reality that after the first few plays, even with that brand new stylus, the quality degraded to that “warm” or, in reality, muffled sound that I remember. The revival we see today is a choice, largely based on the sentimental feelings that we tend to attach to music. Yes, I miss the artwork, the feel and smell, but do I miss the general faff? Not really. Even with a vinyl revival, we have moved light years away in terms of the volume of recordings available digitally today. There are very few who would want to go back to how it used to be. The choice of vinyl is from the world of irrationality not the rational.


The point is that technology doesn’t do sentimental. Compact Discs wiped the floor with vinyl records because they could hold more, were more robust and the sound was consistently good. Downloads have taken this further mainly driven not by sound quality but convenience of format, i.e. the iPod. We are driving down the all too familiar silicon integration cost convenience curve which is underpinned by Moore’s law; skip the box, skip the media and the album. I just want the song. In fact, I don’t have the patience to download, I’m going to stream it… and so on we go.


How do we get from this to thinking about the future of cloud? Well, for me the two are related. My first ever job was working for the American mixed signal chipmaker Analog Devices. Mixed signal simply means analog and digital signals; analog being the “real world” and digital being that of a computer. So their trade was and is in the conversion of the real world into the easier to manipulate, more robust and generally cheaper world of digital – and back again.


When I first started there, the division I worked in made an esoteric analog-digital converter which translated the movement of transducers found on airplanes, tanks, steel mills and missiles into digital so control systems could make the right decisions. There were two methods for making the same thing: the “Hybrid” and the “Monolithic”. At that time, 1987, the Hybrids ruled the day. In those days, the term “hybrid” was used to describe a component where we had to use two different types of silicon to get the thing to work. Hybrid literally means “different elements”. Conversely Monolithic means “(on) the same piece”. The key point was that the monolithic product was cheaper to make – a lot, lot cheaper. It didn’t require the hands of a surgeon to place components on ceramic substrates with gold interconnects. It relied instead on an automated semiconductor process. You know which production method eventually won out.


Let’s move the argument to the current state of cloud computing. Hybrid clouds are very much in vogue and characterize a status quo where the current internet-based cloud doesn’t meet the requirements of all the applications we have. So, we marry the public cloud with private cloud architectures, where we traditionally have foregone flexibility and elasticity for security and control.


As happened in the past, for those analog-digital semiconductors, the world of hybrid cloud is also just a transition, simply a stopping point, not a destination. We currently have pools of computing connected by a variety of communication methods, and we simply haven’t worked out the process to reach the “monolithic” stage. But we will. Current cloud computing is generally made of three things, elastic CPU, RAM and Disk. These can be reached via the internet or some fixed network. Just as semiconductors evolved architectures and designs so that they could become “monolithic”, the same will apply to cloud computing, but writ large across the globe.


The evolution of cloud from pools out on the internet will therefore evolve from today’s triple play to a “quad play” as the fourth element, the network, is integrated and automated for both private and public cloud types of environments – or to give network back its original name, Inter Process Communication, (tipping my hat here to a long line of luminaries who have made this point, from the father of Ethernet, Robert Metcalfe, to Professor John Day pioneering the next evolution of the internet).


Cloud is not a technology but a dynamic way of optimizing your consumption with the availability of resources – the same evolution that has taken us from vinyl to CD to download. The challenge is therefore to restore the original vision of the founding fathers of the core technology that underpins the digital and with it the global economy. The arrival at a global, monolithic “platform of computing” where the network is the computer isn’t a vision or choice. It’s simply the realization of a world set out and supported by a model which has remained faithfully predictable for the last 50 years.


Matthew Finnie is Group CTO and EVP of Cloud Services at Interoute.



The New Space Race: Bringing Internet to the Other 4 Billion


A replica of Sputnik 1 at the U.S. National Air and Space Museum

A replica of Sputnik 1 at the U.S. National Air and Space Museum. The USSR’s small satellite is responsible for starting the space race with the US. Today’s race is off and running. NASA



Back in the 1960s, the race was on between the United States and the USSR to see who could get to the moon first. That high-stakes competition ushered in a new era of space exploration featuring incredible levels of ingenuity, creativity, and scientific mastery. Now, decades later, we are on the verge of yet another space race – the race to build a satellite network capable of bringing the Internet to the estimated 4.4 billion people currently living without access to the “world wide” web.


The company most invested in providing Internet access to the entire planet is ‘net behemoth Google. Through at least two initiatives of their own and a recent $1 billion investment in SpaceX, Google has made it clear that connecting the globe is a serious priority both in the immediate future and beyond.


At the moment, three major efforts are being made to connect the globe to the power of the Internet. And while each has a similar short-term mission, the future applications of each is impressively distinct.


Project Loon


Adopting an innovative – if unorthodox – strategy, Google’s own Project Loon aims to make the Internet more widely available through the use of giant balloons. These special high-altitude balloons are launched into the stratosphere (around 20 kilometers above the surface of the Earth) where they float safely above the danger of airplanes and unfavorable weather. Though it sounds strange, the project is actually ingenious.


Google’s hopes are that Project Loon will provide an inexpensive method for increasing the coverage area needed to bring the web to inhabitants of especially remote areas. The balloons in question are designed with an algorithm utilizes natural patterns of sub-atmospheric wind to ensure that consistent coverage is provided when and where it’s needed most. In effect, the balloons form an enormous communication network that may one day span the entire globe.


In addition to smart programming, the balloons are solar-powered and can provide Internet coverage to an area around 40 kilometers in diameter. By partnering with numerous telecommunications companies, Google hopes Project Loon can use wireless LTE technology to allow people within the coverage area to connect to the web from phones and other mobile devices. The first tests for Project Loon began in the summer of 2013 in New Zealand and have since expanded to cover more ground. The results are have promising, meaning that balloons may be a big part of the Internet’s future.


OneWeb


Led by former Google innovator Greg Wyler, OneWeb looks to bring the Internet to billions through a massive satellite network, one they say will be the largest in the world. Wyler is no stranger to delivering the Internet to remote areas, having set up Africa’s first 3G cell network. He also founded O3B (another company dedicated to bringing the Internet to the entirety of the mankind) before being recruited by Google to head an in-house initiative with the same goal.


OneWeb’s plan includes launching nearly 700 satellites into space, creating a network built to provide high speed Internet at a low cost. The project has already receiving up to $2 billion from financial backers like Qualcomm and Virgin Galactic , with the latter providing use of its LauncherOne program to put the satellites into orbit.


Though still a few years behind Project Loon, OneWeb’s more advanced technology promises far more complex network security and a broader overall reach (it could become a truly worldwide provider, rather than solely focusing on underdeveloped areas.) The OneWeb project has also cleared another important hurdle that remains in place for competitor SpaceX — obtaining the rights to the spectrum needed to deliver the Internet from space


SpaceX


The latest venture for billionaire Elon Musk, SpaceX has already made a splash with its work to advance private space travel. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the company is a major player in the race for worldwide Internet. Musk’s project is similar in design to that being worked on by OneWeb, Musk asserts that his undertaking will be “an order of magnitude more sophisticated than what Greg (Wyler) wants.” In fact, some reports have indicated that Musk and Wyler were interested in partnering, but disagreements over technology and Wyler’s refusal to give up a large stake in O3b broke off any partnership.


Instead, Musk has pushed ahead, stating that he believes “there should be two competing systems.” This competition will be bolstered by the recent $1 billion investment recently poured into SpaceX by investors Google and Fidelity.


The biggest hurdle remaining is the rights to a broadcast spectrum like the one that OneWeb has already locked up. Richard Branson, whose Virgin brand is a key OneWeb investor, believes this could be a dealbreaker for SpaceX. “I don’t think Elon can do a competing thing,” Branson says. “Greg has the rights, and there isn’t space for another network — like there physically is not enough space. If Elon wants to get into this area, the logical thing for him would be to tie up with us.” Musk has instead “discussed using optical-laser technology in his satellites,” though lasers (which can’t pass through clouds) would be a far less reliable method of delivering a connection. Undaunted, Musk says the first stage of the project could be done within five years, but later stages may expand the scope beyond Earth. The long-term goal for the project is to expand a connected network all the way to Mars, where Musk hopes to build a colony in the not-too-distant future.


With billions of dollars in financial backing, all three of these projects seem poised to achieve the goal of delivering the Internet to the entire globe. And for the first time in decades, a new space race has the potential to radically change the life of billions here on earth.


Rick Delgado is a technology commentator and freelance journalist.



Jay-Z Enters Streaming Music Industry, With Bid to Acquire Swedish Company


Jay-Z’s empire may soon be a little bit larger. The rapper and business mogul is about to get into the streaming music business.


On Friday, the Swedish company Aspiro, which is behind the streaming services WiMP and Tidal, announced that Jay-Z’s company, Project Panther, had submitted a bid to acquire Aspiro for $56 million. The deal, which already has unanimous approval, according to a board statement, would catapult Jay-Z, whose given name is Shawn Carter, into one of tech’s most competitive industries.


Gone are the days when Pandora was the only option around for streaming music. Today, there’s Spotify, Rdio, Beats Music, and Sony’s newly announced Playstation Music, which is powered by Spotify. Each service offers a different breadth of music options, for different prices, on different devices, in hopes of eking out a bigger slice of the music streaming pie. If Pandora’s going to be pre-loaded in your BMW, then Spotify’s going to seize on your Uber ride, and Apple’s going to make sure that Beats Music, which it acquired along with Beats’ hardware business last year, is on every single iPhone.


With WiMP and Tidal, Jay-Z would have lots of catching up to do. Today, WiMP has just 512,000 paying users, compared against Spotify’s 15 million and counting. Tidal has yet to release its numbers. Still, both WiMP and Tidal do promise music lovers something different from leading competitors: a higher quality listening experience. That’s because it uses a process called lossless compression that preserves the original audio data, even when the file is compressed. While other options exist for high fidelity audio, including Neil Young’s recently released PonoMusic player (which has faced some harsh criticism since its debut), they’ve yet to truly catch on with the masses. That could be because, generally, they tend to be more expensive than the alternatives, which is a tough sell for a generation that’s grown up on all-you-can-eat, free streaming. Tidal, for one, costs $20 a month.


Still, as arguably one of the most famous faces in music today — not to mention one half of the most famous couple in music today — Jay-Z may be able to bring some much needed cachet to this new type of streaming technology. And for Jay, the advantage is clear. With his hands on a streaming service, he’ll be better able to promote the other parts of his empire, including his entertainment company Roc Nation, and the artists it represents.



Adblock for Real Life. Adblock for Real Life!


A recent hackathon yielded a head-mounted display that automatically detects and blurs ads.

A recent hackathon yielded a head-mounted display that automatically detects and blurs ads. Getty Images/WIRED





Like nature, advertising abhors a vacuum. There’s no reason to assume that future virtual worlds—the fantastic ones we’ll inhabit inside headsets like Oculus Rift, or the augmented ones we might espy through devices like HoloLens—will be any different. The moment there’s a convincing simulacrum of Mars for you to explore, you can bet someone will be trying erect a billboard inside it.

But new technologies offer opportunities for subversion, as well. “Brand Killer,” created by a group of students for the PennApps hackathon, is one such exploration. It’s a customized head-mounted display that uses image processing to recognize brands and logos and blur them in real time. Think of it as ad-block for real life. The idea, its creators write, is to make people “blind to the excesses of corporate branding,” quite literally.